Cascading Style Sheets, used for styling web pages and controlling presentation elements such as layout, colors and fonts, will provide unbelievable new design features in CSS 3. With this new CSS 3 standard, designers will be able to create visually rich sites with unique embedded fonts, drop shadows, rounded corners, and more. Image-free visual effects will streamline and improve a site's speed and media queries will enable the website to detect the user's screen size, specifying which format (mobile phone, tablet, or desktop) displays on the user's device.
As select browsers begin to support pieces of CSS 3, designers are excited to start using these groundbreaking new features. My interview with web design expert and author Janine Warner included a discussion of which CSS 3 feature designers can safely begin to use:
L.C. With the many incredible new design options offered by CSS 3, which feature currently stands out as a highlight that is safe to implement and most effective for usage across various browsers and devices?
J.W. Fonts! You can use any font on your Web pages now. That’s huge for designers and long overdue. The cool thing about the new font features in CSS 3 is that if a browser doesn’t support them, your text simply displays in whatever fonts are available. So you really don’t have much to lose. It’s a good idea to test your designs with more common fonts, such as Times, Helvetica, and Arial, to make sure everything is still readable and looks okay, but with just a few lines of additional code (a link to the font online and inclusion of the font in your style definitions) you can make your designs look so much cooler in most of the latest web browsers. Similarly, the rounded corner and drop-shadow features in CSS 3 are relatively easy to use and don’t do any damage if they’re not supported. Your coolest, hippest visitors who use the latest web browsers will get to see your fabulous designs, and anyone using a browser that doesn’t support these new features, such as an older version of Internet Explorer, will never know the difference.
Please check back soon for the exciting conclusion of this interview with the insightful, prolific Janine as we discuss her recently released mobile web design book and upcoming release of her book on iPhone/iPad web design!
Comments
Awesome!!!
The Cascading Style Sheets 3 sounds really intriguing! Thanks for the great interview, looking forward to the continuation.
Me too!
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